As an experienced researcher, reviewer, and supervisor/mentor of hundreds of young academic researchers, I have experienced a problem, namely that young academics often don’t “know the masters”. Without this knowledge, they often redesign many wheels and aren’t able to really stand on the shoulders of giants and bring the field further.

To this end, I crowdsourced a question a while ago to colleagues in the community, namely: What article or articles do you feel are seminal articles in our field that every (young) researcher should be aware of?

What follows is a cleaned-up, alphabetical list of what I received, each with an abstract or short annotation and where possible, a link to the document itself. It doesn’t pretend to be complete nor definitive. Maybe it’s better to call it an educated beginning.